ENTERPRISE

Just Pave the Road to Serfdom Wider as the Population Grows

Neil, that article you penned last week is truly representative of
your best work. I'm sad to say that I must dispute your optimism,
though. May I point out that "your generation," one that was in less
and less invasive public school than is the youngest, produced a
healthy crop of socialists and fascists, in fact, in overwhelming
proportions to the numbers of liberals (I mean the classical kind,
here; I'll not surrender this word to socialists.)? What reason do
you have to suggest that the next graduates from the Indoctrination
Centers of the Land of the Free will differ in percentage?

After all, ritalin was not available to subdue the quicker class
members thirty-some and forty-some years ago, when the school
system vomited out the likes of Bills Clinton and Bradley, Al Gore
and George Bush.

Sixty channels of glorious state-controlled wonder did not spill
forth from the telescreens of yesteryear, whose size has only grown
into the monstrosities that Ray Bradbury predicted, those that
overshadow reality.

Progressive education had only just begun its campaign of smashing
the self-respect of most of those below and above what the
Progressives perceive as average. "Gifted education" of the sixties
and seventies did not consist almost entirely of platitudes like
"Smart people are special" and "Being smart is cool" to grant a
strange mixture of ego-bloating and guilt to many of the brightest
students subjected to the United States's magnificent school system.
The first victims of that ego-bloating have only now begun to crash
back down into reality. Many burned up on re-entry.

I don't know when drug campaigns like the following were implemented,
but young people haven't always been told that thinking and rational
consideration are superior to "just saying no."

To pretend that the only direct sources of this fuzzy mind-control
were governmental would be naive [John, please amend the "i" in
"naive".], although they were all enhanced, in one way or another, by
the state. For who but the students of an "affirmative action" system
could produce the same militant realization and non-realization of
race that provides an unnecessary confirmation of George Orwell's
prediction of doublethink? Who but they could produce the insane
sexism that so segregates society today, extending far beyond the
areas that it could rationally be considered a decider of action?

The anger and frustration stored in futile childhoods, devoid of
outlets for emotion and almost similarly so for creativity have
stored up a brutal supply of rage and frustration, and have left much
creativity to rot back into the primordial muck from which we came,
has "risen" into the ear drum-numbing, mindless, nearly emotionless
garble that is ever more constantly shoveled into most of America's
youth every day, the volume of which is regulated only by the lack of
speakers powerful enough to shake steel molecules apart from each
other.

In the sixties and seventies, MTV didn't yet provide yet another
diversion from that hated and dreaded crime, thinking, for most
Americans under the age of thirty.

Days spent locked in classrooms sterile in interest but not in
bacteria force students into observing the sensory overloads that MTV
offers for so little to their parents-the youth, of course, would
never be allowed to pay for it themselves. And who, of course, can
provide a more time-consuming baby-sitter to the parents than cable
at a measly thirty-dollars-or-less per month?

Of course, the comparatively wealthy parents of many children provide
much of those childrens' mind-control at home.

Hope for the future? Yes. But quite cautious hope. I'm ever more
tempted to agree with Albert Camus: "One starts living honestly when
one starts living without hope."

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